


In the Clock

by lunchinanelevator



Category: Gentleman Jack (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:13:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25741138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunchinanelevator/pseuds/lunchinanelevator
Summary: "It had been a dream, Ann told herself, fisting the cotton hem of her chemise to assure herself of its reality. Anne Lister was merely a few miles away, asleep at Shibden Hall ('but doomed,' said one of the spirits in a gravelly voice, apparently able to hear her thoughts, 'doomed to burn like any degraded sinner'), sleeping peacefully with no thought of the wretched girl she’d left behind, sick, benighted Ann Walker, who understood absolutely nothing about her."Unseen scenes in the timeline of S1E6—Ann alone, Anne alone, the Ann(e)s together. Angst like whoa.
Relationships: Anne Lister (1791-1840)/Ann Walker (1803-1854)
Comments: 63
Kudos: 96





	1. 3:16 am

**Author's Note:**

> Been out of the fanfic game for a while, but when I watch an episode of something enough times, I should probably write about it. There will be a few chapters, and not every chapter will be … quite this much. I started big. CW for MI and dreamed death.

On the third night she watched them hang Anne.

The ropes chafed her wrists and the wagon that had carried them trembled beneath her and for the brief second that she met her lover’s eyes she heard the words as if they were still seated at the dining-table at Crow Nest, someplace else she’d never see again. “I should have to put my neck in the noose.” It was all so clear for Anne Lister, so simple, courage that transcended the torments of hellfire. Ann knew once she got to Hell herself they would torture her with this very moment over and over, the hiss of the crowd murmuring “unnatural” (she swore she could pick out Eliza Priestly’s voice among the thousands) and the snap of the trapdoor and the rope—

“Ann. Ann.” The face was Harriet’s and the room was dark and the screams were her own. “Ann.”

“She—they—how could they?” She felt her voice crack deep in her throat. Around her the spirits whispered, murmuring “sin” and “abomination” and “no less than you deserve.” “How could you?” Ann cried out, addressing them directly. Close to her ear, the wizened priest’s deep voice intoned, “Let her burn. Let the hellfire catch—”

Ann screamed again, then retched, Harriet recognizing the gesture and scrambling to grab the mercifully empty chamber pot in time. When Ann finally raised her face from it, sweat plastering her curls to her temples, Harriet’s eyes were wide. “Ann, please,” she said, “you’ve got to tell me what’s wrong,” and a simpering female spirit with a pinched voice whispered, “She could have saved you from the everlasting torment, this one, if you’d only listened and left well enough alone.”

It had been a dream, Ann told herself, fisting the cotton hem of her chemise to assure herself of its reality. Anne Lister was merely a few miles away, asleep at Shibden Hall (“but doomed,” said one of the spirits in a gravelly voice, apparently able to hear her thoughts, “doomed to burn like any degraded sinner”), sleeping peacefully with no thought of the wretched girl she’d left behind, sick, benighted Ann Walker, who understood absolutely nothing about her.

Ann met Harriet’s round, beseeching eyes. “You have to go,” she said, her voice shaking. 

“Are you going to sleep, Ann?”

“I mean you have to go—away from Crow Nest. You have to go home.”

(“Yes,” said the simpering woman’s voice while Ann shook her head desperately, “let all the righteous leave this den of iniquity before—”)

“I’m to stay until the end of March, though,” Harriet said. “Aren’t I? Didn’t we agree?”

“Harriet, you have to leave!”

Then Ann would be alone, she knew, with the spirits closing in on her, with the horrific spectre of Anne Lister’s death eclipsing the warm remembered scraps that remained of Anne’s love. She’d driven Anne away, she’d done that with her own foolishness and indecision, and now, as the gravel-voiced spirit was quick to remind her, she would face the sulfur pits of Hell with no sweet touch on her thigh, no relief. She had done that to herself, but Harriet, too, had been a part of it, and Ann couldn’t keep waking up from these nightmares and be faced again and again with how she’d failed and what she’d lost.

(“Nightmares, you call us?” said the priest. “You think that now you know of nightmares?”)

“I don’t think I should leave you like this, Ann,” Harriet said, her voice betraying uncertainty. For just one second her eyes darted towards the dark, ghostly outline of the door, and Ann could see it: Harriet would run right now from Crow Nest and never return if not for her misplaced piety and duty.

“Some—someone else can stay with me,” Ann said, gulping suddenly as she felt a trace of bile rise again in her throat and panic skitter across her chest, for who would stay now that she had lost, or maybe killed, or maybe doomed, the one who loved her? Finally her mind lit on a solution. “I’ll send a note to my cousin Catherine. I’ll have James take it in the morning.”

Morning felt as distant as Rome for the carnival, someplace else she knew she’d never visit.

“Miss Rawson, yes.” Harriet nodded. Ann had hardly noticed Harriet’s hand trembling against her wrist until it steadied, the solution settling her movement. “That would be wise, I think.”

“The worst kind of danger.” The spirits, further from her ear—Ann was fairly certain, now, that they spent most of their time in the clock outside, between her room and the adjoining chamber—echoed Harriet’s words from last week, menacing ticks keeping a steady beat behind them. “This world and the next. The worst kind of danger.”

It was more than Ann could bear that Harriet might hear them, might know she had been right; equally, it was more than she could bear to know that Harriet couldn’t hear them. Catherine would hear them, though. Of that she was sure. Sensible Catherine would understand the threat she faced; practical Catherine would be able to find a solution. The possibility of her cousin, the hope of the companion who had understood her since childhood, flickered for a second like the first trace of light on Ann’s horizon. 

“I’ll have Millie pack my things, then. When she wakes up,” Harriet said, referring to her lady’s maid, and Ann could hear it clearly this time, Harriet’s relief. Maybe Harriet did hear the spirits. Maybe she was just pretending so she didn’t have to acknowledge what she was leaving Ann to endure. Maybe—probably—she thought that Ann deserved all she got.

“Then go,” Ann said. “Go to bed.”

“Can you sleep again?”

“I—” She wanted to say yes just so her friend would go, although like last night and the night before she’d be up ‘til dawn. Being with Harriet was at least as bad as being alone. But one of the spirits was moaning, his low voice in harmony with the pounding of the clock, and Ann found she couldn’t speak over it. “I—”

“Would you like a glass of water?” Harriet, candle again in hand, flicked her wrist in the direction of the second night-table, where Grandmother Walker’s silver pitcher rested in a basin. One of the spirits laughed, as if to say that water didn’t stand a chance against the coming fire.


	2. 1:58 am

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anne on the same night.

By the third night Anne Lister had found a way to sleep almost comfortably—a position that kept the weight off what she was now sure was a crack in her rib, kept her pillow from brushing against the worst bruises. Nonetheless, rest eluded her. It took only the fall of darkness to trap her again in the cycle of those few hours. The man’s hands on her throat and grasping through her skirts, leaving no doubt as to his intentions. “I can’t do this, Anne.” Stifling moans of pain as she dragged her feet along the stone outside Shibden. His tobacco-soaked saliva mixing with blood on her face. Ann declaring their love repugnant, her torso so tense as to nearly snap in two as she said it.

Queer. Against God.

Anne’s bed stretched around her, its hangings bristling in the breeze from the open window. Again and again, in her mind, the girl’s lips twisted with the cruel words.

But was the way they all went, wasn’t it, really? It always came to this. Vere, Mariana, now insipid little Miss Walker, none of them to prepared to place even two shaky feet in a stream Anne herself had been born on the other side of.

Anne blinked rapidly, salt stinging the cuts on her cheek and at the corner of her eye. Sometimes the worst of it all was knowing what Mariana would say: she brought this on herself, the way to stop it was so clear and so simple, it was her sheer stubbornness that led her to deny the obvious.

Tonight, Anne Lister was bereft of both love and counterargument.

Sleep would not come. Irritated, Anne rose from her bed and paced the room, listening to the ancient boards creak beneath each footfall. A waxing gibbous moon cast fine light onto her dressing-table, glinting off the tiny hinge of the jeweler’s box, and another one of the bilious waves that had dogged Anne for the last several days overtook her. Suddenly, she had to get out of the room. She longed to be crossing the Channel, striding beside the Seine, traversing the Italian countryside, anywhere, anywhere, anywhere but here. All that was impossible now, of course; she’d not even received a response from Mariana’s Thomas Beech, much less fetched her carriage from York. But she was surrounded by gardens and moors and fields and roads, all places she could breathe. She couldn’t breathe here.

Anne dressed hastily, tossing on drawers and skirt and blouse with abandon—nobody was going to see her—and threw her greatcoat over it all as she stormed out the door.

She was down to the tree line she’d planted with her men before she breathed properly again, the cloud of air she released between her lips for a moment misting her view of the scattered stars. Astronomy was a subject she’d never learned much about, and she wondered what it would be to look at the raucous patterns of light above her head and understand the way they mapped onto the myths of the ancient Egyptians or Greeks. Beneath the true scope of the universe, or even within the infinity of the human brain, this foolishness with Miss Walker was so insignificant as to mean nothing at all.

How something so insignificant, then, could make her feel as though she were choking, as if someone was screaming into her ear, Anne Lister couldn’t say.

She hadn’t meant to allow the girl such a hold over her. It had been—not a lark, perhaps, but more to do with the money, the challenge the sweet little heiress posed to Anne’s own skills as a seductress. The truth was she hadn’t even been certain she’d meant it about the sacrament, though of course she planned to keep it as she’d keep any vow she made before God. The money had always been in the back of her mind, dangling as proof of her possible triumph, her window, perhaps, to prove Mariana wrong. 

But now, hang the loan. Hang the coal-pit, hang revenge on the Rawsons for their dirty tricks and the criminals that surrounded them, hang it all if she could erase just that last hour with Miss Walker. if she could have never heard those poisonous words.

The night was silent but for the calls of frogs here and there. Anne sat sprawling on the ground and looked at the sky, her boots barely secured to her feet, until exhaustion began to crisp the edges of her consciousness and light just brushed the horizon. She noticed as she scrambled up that her hands, at least, had begun to heal, the bruises and scrapes from throwing incautious punches nearly so noticeable as they’d been even a day ago.

She could get better, then, she reminded herself as she staggered back uphill. It wasn’t impossible. It never was. She would heal in body, and then she would leave this place to heal the same ragged, desperate heart that had failed her over and over. She’d be all right.

She was all right, really. 

These longing aches, the pains that seemed to shoot directly from the bruises in her eye to some hollow cavity in the centre of her chest, meant nothing at all.

“Ma’am!” Cordingley, bent over the fireplace, started as Anne came through the door.

Anne scowled. “Cordingley.”

“Are you just coming in, then? Where have you been? Is everything all right?”

“What on earth are you doing up?”

“Readying breakfast, ma’am,” Cordingley said, looking at Anne quizzically, as if the answer were obvious. And, perhaps, because of Anne’s disheveled mien; Anne’s appearance had, after all, been Cordingley’s responsibility for years. “Your father and your aunt’ll be awake soon enough.”

For the first time that Anne could remember, she had no idea what time it was. A quick bob back into the hallway gave her the answer—twenty-three minutes past five, and indeed, light had long since begun to creep into the house from without—but nonetheless the sensation was disconcerting. “Mmm,” she said, nodding brusquely.

“Will you take your breakfast with them, then?” Cordingley inquired.

Anne stared at her, barely comprehending for a moment. “No. I—I think I’ll go back to bed.”

Cordingley’s look was something like alarm. “Ma’am?”

“I’m still—” Anne gestures vaguely to her scratched and bruised visage “—not quite well. If you’ll make my excuses to them.”

Not waiting for Cordingley’s answer, she turned and dragged herself up the kitchen stairs.


	3. 8:22 am

_Ourfatherwhoartinheaven …_

Catherine wasn’t a fool. Eliza Priestley had been disappointed at Miss Parkhill’s departure, certainly, but Catherine had heard her relief that it was “you, my dear Miss Rawson” and not Miss Lister who had arrived in her stead. She knew the missive she sent to Miss Lister could arouse disapproval from every corner of her family.

But—and this she wouldn’t even tell Miss Lister—for the two nights that Catherine was there alone, in the chamber that was always hers for visits, she heard Ann screaming, “Anne! No! Anne!” as she awoke, her voice ripe with pain and longing, and Catherine was confident she wasn’t referring to herself.

Catherine knew the risk she was taking, and she wasn’t altogether sure she trusted Miss Lister, but it wasn’t her trust, or Eliza Priestley’s, that was important now.

_Hallowedbethynamethykingdomcomethywillbedone …_

On that first night Miss Lister stayed, Catherine had watched her cousin dive for and cling to the woman as though she were the only buoy in Ann’s storm of voices and prayer. She’d watched Miss Lister comfort her cousin with a tenderness so exquisite that the tears abrading Catherine’s eyes couldn’t help but fall. How, Catherine wondered, could Miss Lister be so calm, so centered in the face of Ann’s incoherence? She was ashamed that she herself could not assuage her cousin’s panic, astonished to see this brusque, eccentric woman approach Ann in the dark with gentleness that would have seemed impossible if you met her in daylight.

_Onearthasitisinheavenonearthasitisinheavenonearthasitisinheaven…_

Catherine had always been alone with Ann’s madness. Not that she had ever seen her cousin quite like this, but always she had kept the secret from Grandmother and Aunt Anne, from her parents, even from Delia, carrying with her the unspoken knot of knowledge that Miss Lister had articulated so calmly at the breakfast table. They’d have Ann put away, if they knew—Delia out of fear, Aunt Anne concerned for her family’s reputation, Uncle Christopher most likely from pure vindictiveness. (And all of them, really, in the hopes of getting their hands on Ann’s money, but Catherine never allowed that thought to form fully in her mind.) So Catherine had taught herself to take Ann’s listlessness, instability, and occasional delusions lightly, to make her tone chirpy when she sensed any unfamiliar fluctuation in Ann’s mood. That was what Catherine couldn’t explain when Miss Lister implored her to keep the secret: Catherine had always kept the secret. The unimaginable feeling was sharing it.

She wasn’t a fool, though. She understood Ann, and she was beginning to understand Miss Lister.

_Forgiveusourtrespassesasweforgivethosewhotrespassagainstus…_

On the second night, by the time Ann screamed for Catherine, Miss Lister was already there with a proprietary arm around Ann’s shoulders, disheveled and gentle, and Catherine saw both pillows on the bed indented as if a head had rested upon each. When Ann momentarily exhausted herself and nodded off, it was against Miss Lister’s breast, and when she abruptly woke again, screaming, “You can’t, you can’t, you won’t” she flung herself over Miss Lister, pinning her to the bed and then glaring out into the dark, expression fierce and defensive, as if meeting the eyes of someone or something Catherine couldn’t see. Miss Lister, recovering quickly from the shock, sat up and wrapped tight arms around a trembling Ann. For just a moment, they seemed to melt into each other like liquid, one quavering and desperate form.

Then Ann shook Miss Lister off and returned to her frenetic prayer. Miss Lister caught Catherine’s eye, as if she’d only just remembered that Catherine was there, and the two once again took up their places on either side of Ann, pillars of pretended stability.

Three more times an almost-identical cycle repeated itself—one time Ann woke scrabbling her hands desperately at Miss Lister’s neck, as if trying to remove something from it; one time doing the same to her own neck; one time she seemed about to spit in Miss Lister’s face before recognizing who she was and then weeping—“Anne, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” (That was the only time Miss Lister flinched.) Finally Ann remained asleep for long enough that Miss Lister gently, cautiously lay back, her body horizontal across the bed, Ann still clinging to her. Catherine, finding herself both reluctant to leave Ann and to leave the two alone, lay down parallel to Miss Lister, her head on the farthest pillow. She wondered if Miss Lister would react with some proprietary or defensive gesture, but she simply nodded, as if all was as right as it could be. After a few seconds Catherine heard Miss Lister whisper, “Miss Rawson, might I have one of those pillows as well?”

And somehow, all of this was normal now.

_Andleadusnotintotemptationbutdeliverusfromevil …_

Catherine had tried, in the past, to imagine Ann with a husband. She attempted to create in her mind the man that she could trust with Ann, the sort she would encourage her to marry. For a while Delia had thought she might marry a Mr. Atwood, from York, and Catherine had played much the same sort of mental game, considering Delia’s worst qualities—her tendency to twist any phrase into an insult, the way she’d go blank in a conversation she found uninteresting—and how Mr. Atwood might chafe at or engage with or complement them. It had always been harder with Ann, and now Catherine found it nigh upon impossible. She could think of no approach to Ann in such a wretched state that would rival Miss Lister’s. 

What Catherine had heard about Miss Lister was true. She wouldn’t deny what she saw, try though she might have done back in the Lake District. It wasn’t that Catherine regretted listening to the rumors; she hadn’t quite been truthful that first morning. She regretted taking them at face value. She regretted her own failure to understand what they meant. 

More than anyone else in her life, Catherine thought, recalling the bizarre conversation between Uncle Christopher and his mother a few weeks back, her own grandmother had the measure of Miss Lister. Certainly, no one could mistake Miss Lister for dull, nor could one dispute her snobbery or assume they would come out the better with her in any exchange. But this didn’t mean that she couldn’t be trusted. Miss Lister was determined, and clever, and quick—quick to think, quick to anger, quick to grasp the scope of a problem, quick to snap into solving it.

And perhaps, Catherine thought now, quick to love.

_Forthineisthekingdomthepowernandthegloryforeverandeverforeverandeverforeverandeverforeverandeverforeverandever …_

On the third or the fourth or the seventh or the tenth morning—so disrupted was all of their sleep that one day simply blurred into the next—Catherine, as she often did now, woke with Miss Lister but kept up the pretense of sleep. (Not that it was difficult; Catherine wondered how Miss Lister managed to bound with vigor into a day after the nights they had. Catherine herself was grateful to be able to rest as long as Ann did.) Beneath lowered lids she watched the woman remove her odd clothing from the trunk that had taken up residence in a corner of Ann’s bedchamber, glance cautiously over her shoulder, and depart for the bedroom next door, as if Catherine would have forgotten that it or she was there. Catherine let her eyes fall for an half-hour or so and woke again as Miss Lister returned to the room wearing one of her masculine ensembles.

Miss Lister bent over Ann, touching her hair and cheek as though putting her fingers to holy relics. Catherine listened to the low, rough voice tell Ann she was leaving.

Ann said something so soft that even Catherine couldn’t hear it, and Miss Lister lifted Ann’s hand to kiss it, like a gentleman, like Mr. Atwood used to do. Ann seized her wrist and said, with a sudden trace of her night-time vehemence, “Promise me. Anne. You must promise me.”

Miss Lister kissed her palm and said, “Yes.”


	4. 4:58 pm

As her sobs abated, Ann could hear the silence in the room again. Silence should have been a relief—no spirits, no Catherine, James and Elsie and the other staff somewhere too far away to matter—but instead it made it alarmingly clear that Anne hadn’t said a word, had hardly moved. Her head still rested on her hand, her knee to the floor, her body curving in on itself.

For a moment everything was still. Ann couldn’t shed even one more tear, although Lord, seeing Anne like this made her wish she could. Anne, it seemed, had noticed nothing at all since Ann said no.

Ann’s vision had blurred too quickly, but she thought the ring had been onyx, in a circle of what could have been tiny diamonds. She couldn’t imagine where Anne had gotten it, what she’d paid for it, how she’d had been fool enough to imagine it on Ann’s finger. Fool enough to trust her. (“You’ve got to stop having such a poor opinion of yourself,” Anne said weeks or months ago, and maybe, maybe, Ann had finally proved to the tenacious Miss Lister that she herself knew better.)

At long last Anne seemed to realize again where she was. She unfolded, slipping the ring back into her pocket as she stood, so smoothly it might never have been there. Ann watched her, the precision returned to her face and posture, the hairs that might have seemed out of place a moment ago somehow invisible in this light.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose I should be going.”

“You won’t—” Ann stopped herself before the words got all the way out.

Of course Anne wouldn’t stay the night now.

“You’ll go to Inverness,” Anne said brusquely, not looking at her. “It sounds like it’s probably the best for you.” She grimaced as she said it, as if the thought, or something else altogether, physically pained her. 

Anne had once said it didn’t matter that Ann couldn’t give her what she wanted. “These things take time,” she’d said, and those four words had opened up infinity around Ann, and shortly thereafter an infinity within her, one that she could never have imagined without Anne’s gifted lips and long fingers, without the conversations that outstripped the dull repetitions of Halifax afternoons. 

“I—I wanted you to meet them,” Ann said. “Elizabeth and the children.”

“Yes. Well.”

Ann didn’t know if the spirits had quieted over the last several days or if they were simply easier to ignore when she was in Anne’s arms. They hadn’t left completely, though, and the horrific nightmares could still be visions of the future. Her love for Anne, Anne’s love for her, was almost as powerful as the spirits. She could feel it. But was it enough? Could Anne truly keep Ann from what she feared, when Anne herself clearly feared nothing at all?

“Well,” Ann agreed.

For just a second, she saw the depths of those sad brown eyes. Then she looked down, oddly furious. Why did Anne have to ask her now? Why right now, when it would be ludicrous to have her?

She had let herself imagine it. Those days in York could be her life, keeping pace with Anne’s long and purposeful strides, meeting people as kind as Dr. Belcombe, as sophisticated and captivating the woman herself. She, Ann Walker, would be chosen, Anne Lister’s envied companion, their journeys fast-paced and glittering. They’d cross the water, taking one boat and then another. Anne had tried to explain the sensation to her once—“You recognize, you see, you have to, that the water is in control of everything, even the ground beneath your feet, but once you understand that it’s possible to be quite comfortable”—but what Ann really longed for was the sea itself, to be upon it instead of watching it like Elizabeth did in Inverness. What a thing it would be, to stand beside Anne, allowing their hips to touch, while the water carried them along. Ann would conquer the strictures of marriage, reject the very confines of land. She could overcome any fear of the mysterious Italy that had killed her beloved John: Anne Lister would protect her. And the nights in Paris—that land of holes in pockets—would transcend those in York. This Anne had promised her, whispering into the night. Ann had been trembling in her arms, newly satiated, murmuring that Anne was skilled beyond belief. “Wait until I take you to Paris, Miss Walker,” said Anne’s gentle voice against her ear. She was still holding a hand between Ann’s legs. “This is nothing at all. Paris … inspires me.” She slid her slick fingers along Ann’s queer once more, stopping at that nexus of unbelievable pleasure, and Ann had shuddered again and kissed and kissed Anne’s neck.

“Will you write to your sister, then?” Anne inquired.

Ann nodded.

“Please let her know that I send my best wishes.” There was ice beneath the formality, iciness akin to her tone when she spoke of Mr. Ainsworth. Always, Anne Lister was in control. It must have been an effort to have patience with Ann’s sprawl and desperation these last several weeks.

“Good—good day, Miss Walker.”

She was going to leave. Ann had been right: she would go to Scotland and never see her again. Her stomach swooped and one of the male spirits, who had never crept into this room before now, murmured in her ear, “Let her go. Perhaps this is your chance to save yourself. It’s she who doomed you, after all. You know where she’ll be going. Where you’ll see her next.”

“I doomed myself,” Ann hissed urgently back at him. “You need to shut up.”

“What’s that?” said Anne, turning.

What had she heard?

Her expression was close to disgust. Ann couldn’t tell if she had caught any of the words. Anne didn’t hear the spirits, they’d established that long ago; what would she think Ann was saying? What would she think she meant?

“Anne, I—”

Anne waited.

“I want …”

After a moment, Anne directed herself towards the door again. Ann couldn’t bear it. “Anne!” she said.

Again the woman halted, this time not even looking at her.

“It—it isn’t—”

“I can think of many things it isn’t. What do you mean?”

“It isn’t that I don’t want to,” Ann finished softly, staring at the straight back of the only person who had ever made the choice to care about her.

Anne whirled. Her blazing eyes met Ann’s. “Why want,” she demanded furiously, “what you refuse to have?”

Ann had no answer for that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loving the comments, thank you all so much! Please leave one if you're in the mood--they keep my spirits up!


	5. 6:34 pm

Oddly enough, Anne had never been to Scotland. “One would think you’d travelled everywhere,” Ann had said the first time she’d learned this, when they were planning their springtime voyages as though they could ever be real. But it had never occurred to Anne—once she realized she could go away from Halifax, she wanted to go as far as possible, to leave the confines of the kingdom altogether.

Perhaps it was this simple lack of familiarity that made the distance sound unfathomable.

Or perhaps it was that Ann had long since moved to the other side of reality. Was Scotland any more distant, really? Or was it what would finally make her irretrievable?

“Ann and Elizabeth and I,” Catherine was saying, “and my sister Delia when she was a bit older as well, would play hide-and-go-seek among the statuary in the eastern part of the estate. Elizabeth was always cleverer at it than the rest of us, of course, being older, but she was quite sporting about the whole …”

They were arrayed around the dining-table, the five of them, Captain Sutherland and Catherine carrying most of the weight of conversation with the odd intrusion from the elder Mrs. Sutherland. Anne herself was unaccustomed to being so quiet, but she had been drawn into the orbit of Ann’s listlessness, a despondency so loud that Anne found it difficult to speak over. 

Was that what Ann meant when she spoke of “spirits”? Emotions so present at the table that they might as well be speaking? No, Ann meant it literally—they had long established that. She heard voices speaking one at a time, heard imagined men describing Anne’s death and her own as well as their sufferings in the afterlife. They were no metaphors; the “spirits” were simply imagined and ludicrous.

Still, Anne found herself harkening back to Steph’s assertion that emotional pain was just as acute as physical, but more challenging to understand and therefore to treat.

She supposed her own nausea when faced with losing Ann might stand as evidence of that.

“Oh, very much so,” said Captain Sutherland, responding to something Catherine had just said. “My brothers and I and our cousin Alexander often engaged in such antics when we were boys …”

Anne glanced sidelong at the girl beside her, who was pushing a fork around her plate and looking at nothing. She had eaten even less than Anne had. She’d be gone tomorrow, Crow Nest standing across the moors from Shibden as empty as a wound.

_Don’t leave me again. Promise me._

Why was Ann the only one allowed to extract that promise?

“Alice will be delighted to see you,” Captain Sutherland said now, bestowing a tight smile on his sister-in-law. “Mrs. Sutherland—my wife—talks of you, and Alice always wonders at the notion that she has an aunt she’s never met. Of course, her mother tells her that she _has_ met you, but Alice considers it unimportant if it’s outside the purview of her memory.”

“Oh!” said Catherine. “How I wish I could see her! And Sackville must be quite the young gentleman now. Will you sketch them, Ann, while you’re there? It would be wonderful to see an image of what they look like.”

“We’re commissioning a family portrait now that little Mary can sit up,” Captain Sutherland said, “but it’s nearly an insurmountable challenge getting the two older ones to sit still for long enough…”

“I’ve heard,” Anne put in, “that there are two gentlemen in Paris who aim to use a newly discovered chemical process to fix the images from a camera obscura onto metal plates. Imagine it—they might be able to create a still replica of an image.”

“Goodness,” said Captain Sutherland. He sounded rather impressed by the information, and Catherine’s face held that enchanted look that Anne used to take pride in inspiring on young women. Right now she would have given anything to transfer that expression to Ann, to bring some light to her dull, glazed eyes.

“If they succeed,” Anne continued, “someday you’ll be able to own a printed copy of the image itself.”

“Would it resemble a portrait, do you think, Miss Lister?” said Mrs. Sutherland.

“From what I understand,” Anne countered, “this process might ultimately render portraiture obsolete as an art form. Portraiture could fall to this technology altogether.”

Beside her, Ann somehow wilted a little more. _Portraits_ , Anne realized. Even when Ann’s opinion of herself was desperately low, as it often was, she displayed her sketches with pride, and more than once had tried to convince Anne to sit for her. (Once, giggling in the aftermath of their connection, she had suggested that she might sketch Anne without drawers or chemise, and Anne hadn’t wanted to admit how much the notion tempted her.) Anne could have kicked herself. How could she have been so thoughtless?

“Of course, they’re still in the experimental stages,” she amended. “Who knows how long such a process will take to refine. I shouldn’t even know about it; it’s a great secret. I only heard from a friend of mine when I was last in France.”

She let Captain Sutherland take the reins of the conversation once again. How she wished she were alone with Ann, that she might soothe and comfort her. But what comfort was there now to be had, really? They would be apart, for heaven knew how long. Ann would get better or she would not, and Anne would travel the continent bound into the same isolation that had dogged her since girlhood, the memory of Ann Walker become another layer of stiff black fabric on her travelling coat. 

While Atteberry served pudding, at which Ann’s cook particularly excelled, Anne’s mind wandered to this “ladies’ physician” that Mrs. Sutherland had spoken of. She would have to ask Steph about Dr. Hamilton, see if the man had established any sort of reputation outside Edinburgh. But really, what if he hadn’t? Couldn’t a skilled and thoughtful medical man choose to limit his practice to one location, and put any concern he might have had for his national reputation into increasing knowledge and learning? Anne would like to think that was how she’d do it herself were she a man, but then again, she thought ruefully, she would probably put a great deal of energy into bolstering her reputation abroad. (Certainly here in Halifax she made mention of her time with M. Couvier often enough.) She spun in her mind a gentle doctor, older and more venerable than Steph, who would approach Ann with compassion and care, calm her enough that she would accept remedies to soothe her fevered mind.

Anne wondered if there was a specific chemical response in the human brain that created delusions, that might cause one to hear such voices as Ann did. She wondered if pain like Ann’s could be mapped in the brain, if someday science would advance far enough to be able to trace its path and alleviate it.

How Anne wished it was a matter of a salve, or the laying of hands.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Ann said, standing up so suddenly that her chair wobbled for a moment on two precarious legs, “I haven’t quite finished packing, and I want to be certain that we can depart according to your itinerary.” She nodded to Captain Sutherland. “I hope you won’t think it rude if I bid you goodnight?”

She sounded so perfectly herself that it took Anne’s breath away.

“Of course not,” said Captain Sutherland smoothly. “I appreciate your consideration. Your man can bring your trunks down first thing in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“Do pack something warm, dear,” Mrs. Sutherland interjected. “I daresay it might be rather cooler by the sea than you’re used to here.”

“Miss Lister,” Ann said. “Might you be able to assist me with my books, and in selecting a shawl or two?”

“Of course,” Anne responded, rising herself. She felt a pang of conscience leaving Catherine at the table, but really, Catherine had been holding her own thus far. “Goodnight, then, Captain Sutherland. Mrs. Sutherland. Miss Rawson.”

Probably Eliza Priestley had contacted Elizabeth Sutherland; probably all of them at the table had just had their suspicions about Anne and Ann confirmed. But why should Anne care what they thought? Tomorrow they’d be gone, and Ann would be gone, and there would be nothing to wonder or gossip about anymore.

Hardly had they crossed the threshold into Ann’s chamber when Ann threw herself into Anne’s arms, clinging to her waist and crying softly into her shoulder. Anne threaded her fingers into Ann’s upswept hair, pulled her head back, and kissed her, as fiercely as she could, to stop her own lips from trembling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please keep commenting, y'all! I have two more chapters to go, one more Catherine and one more AW …


	6. 9:43 am

They’d sent Ann away once before. The year that Ann’s sister Mary had died—they were children then, or near enough to—Catherine had been walking with Ann and Elizabeth on a summer afternoon. (Young Catherine had always looked up to both Ann and Elizabeth, her beautiful, gentle older cousins, Elizabeth the initiator of games, Ann the arbiter of whether everyone was playing fairly. Ann sometimes even tried to convince Elizabeth to include Delia out of a sense of justice, so as not to leave her behind with the babies, but when Elizabeth refused, Catherine was always secretly relieved. Her cousins could be hers, and hers alone.) They stumbled upon, of all things, an awkwardly placed and untended vegetable patch, carrots disheveled and chewed, squash swelling on the vines. Catherine and Elizabeth had wondered aloud at its condition, but Ann fell to her knees and declared that it had been Mary’s, that it had been forgotten like everything else, that she had promised to take care of it and instead had destroyed it forever. Her tears turned to hysteria, hysteria to screams, screams to tearing furiously at the sleeve of her gown, as if unable to stop. It terrified Catherine. Elizabeth sent her back to the house to find her father, Catherine’s Uncle John—“don’t tell anyone else!” she hissed—but Catherine, blinded by tears and stumbling over the hem of her frock, had shouted to her uncle and brought the attention of Aunt Mary, her own mother and father, and several of the other uncles as well. 

Ann had been gone for three months that time, at what Catherine’s mother, dismissively, said was some sort of retreat to further her schooling. She had need of refinement, Mrs. Rawson sniffed. Ann had come back quieter, adopted the habit of staring out over unfathomable distance that she still retained today. She had never talked about what it had been like. Catherine had never asked her.

“Oh,” said Ann, glancing up as Catherine came into the library. “I was just making sure—there was nothing else that I needed.”

“And—is there?” Never in her life had Catherine felt so awkward with her cousin.

“Probably everything. I’ve probably forgotten everything.” Ann sighed, leaning against one of the bookshelves at an angle that looked uncomfortable to Catherine. “And probably everyone will forget me.”

“No one will forget you.” The words raised an alarm within Catherine, striking dangerously close to the fear that pulsed at night.

“There’s no one to take care of me here. That’s what he keeps saying, what Elizabeth said in her letter.” Catherine pictured Elizabeth’s delicate handwriting, was flooded with a sudden memory of Elizabeth teaching her to write when she was five years old. She remembered her older cousin’s hand cupping over her tiny one, guiding her quill across the page as she copied the letters Elizabeth had written out for her one by one. In many ways she’d been a stricter taskmaster than Catherine’s governess. Catherine wondered whether Elizabeth’s character was similar now that she was a mother, and whether that would be good for Ann now.

“They’re probably right.”

“Perhaps. Certainly not your uncles or …” Ann’s words drifted off and she stared out the window, at the elegant, closely kept Crow Nest grounds.

“I would if I could,” Catherine said, though she wasn’t sure it was really true. The circumstances that could make such a thing possible were so unimaginable it was hardly worth considering, but at the same time, she wished that Ann—or anyone else—had even the slightest understanding of all she, Catherine, had done for Ann thus far. Sometimes she thought Miss Lister saw it; sometimes she thought Miss Lister trusted her as no one in the family had. 

These weeks with Ann had so consumed Catherine that, looking at her cousin decked for travelling, she was startled at the sharp and furious intrusion of loneliness. She’d be without Ann now, without the sense of purpose she had shared with Miss Lister, without the fear that clenched around her spine but with no other movement to replace it.

“Have you ever been in love, Catherine?” Ann asked suddenly.

Catherine looked at her cousin, startled. Then she found she could no longer meet Ann’s eyes, and she looked towards the carpet. “Yes. I was once.”

“Really?” said Ann, surprised. 

Catherine nodded. The center of her chest burned, embers long dormant somehow licked again with flame. She felt the heat, the flush, the fear creep through her. Almost as it had; almost as she had felt constantly throughout those months.

Ann exhaled. “What happened? Why didn’t you marry?”

Tears filled Catherine’s eyes, and she kept her face down. She’d kept the secret from Ann so long now, and so successfully, that she’d assumed Ann would never ask, that such a question would never occur to her.

“He wouldn’t,” Catherine finally said. She tried to gather the loose threads inside herself, breathed deeply, and then met her cousin’s eyes for just a moment as she told the truth: “He … couldn’t.”

“Oh,” said Ann softly, and then again: “Oh.” 

She reached for Catherine’s hand, and Catherine, so accustomed to Ann trembling in the middle of the night, was surprised to find the press of her fingers both steady and steadying. They didn’t look at each other.

“How—how long ago?” said Ann.

“Two years. Or nearly. A year and—ten months. Eleven.”

“Have you seen—”

“No,” said Catherine quickly, not wanting Ann to finish the question. “No. He—he doesn’t live here. He—they went back home.” Ann waited. Catherine waited, and said the words that she’d never said aloud: “They have a child now.”

Though even at the time, Catherine had wondered if it was true, or if his brusque “she’s with child” had simply been an attempt to frighten Catherine away. It hadn’t worked. She hadn’t been frightened, then, not until a few minutes later.

Now Ann nodded, slowly, her face still and her gray-blue eyes gleaming. The next words came out gradually, as if she’d had to select each one and then extract it. “And still you—think of it? Of him? Still you remember?”

“You don’t forget,” Catherine said, biting down hard on her trembling lip.

Again Ann nodded. She pressed her thumb into Catherine’s palm, sensing that Catherine had nearly reached the limits of her composure. This too was part of their history. Catherine had never been a martyr to Ann’s oddity. Her cousin understood her, instinctively, in a way that none of her sisters ever could. It was an understanding Catherine was always afraid to lose, and one of the things she fought to preserve when she protected Ann.

She couldn’t help but wonder if Miss Lister felt similarly. It wasn’t some pure, unadulterated goodness that bound either of them to Ann. It was need, and compassion, and still something else.

A brief rap at the door startled them both. Ann seemed to recover her composure first. “Yes?” she said, with the light imperiousness that came into her voice when she talked to her servants. Catherine envied it; she’d often thought, privately, that she herself would take greater advantage if she had been given the gift of Ann’s independence.

James stepped in. “They’ve begun to board the carriage, ma’am,” he said, glancing at Ann, concern marring the corners of his mouth, his expression less inscrutable than usual. “I think perhaps they’re waiting for you.”

“I suppose I should join them,” Ann sighed after a moment.

“Perhaps, ma’am.”

Ann rose, her hand still pressing Catherine’s. “I’ll be out right away, James,” she said, and he nodded smartly and exited ahead of them.

Ann looked back at Catherine and steered them both towards the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You gotta love the term "independence" as it was used! Anyway, one more chapter coming. Thank you for reading!


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